


safe passage through my mind

by tpiob



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, a wild martin sister appears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 03:31:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tpiob/pseuds/tpiob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jennifer Blake returns to Beacon Hills, the town is still overrun with supernatural beings, nothing much has changed. </p>
<p>In which Paige is Jennifer Blake, because it only makes sense like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	safe passage through my mind

There’s a sudden overwhelming ache crawling its way up her arm where it’s gripped in his, and it feels – strange. Like a feedback loop rather than the numb buzz that settled deep in her bones the moment the alpha had bitten down.

 

It doesn’t last but she thinks she feels it snake around her heart and seep its way in.

 

She doesn’t think about it for a long time, afterward.

 

\---

 

It’s hard not to know the Hales; they’re the biggest family in Beacon Hills after all and, assuming the town records are right, they’ve been here the longest.

 

Paige thinks there’s something about them though, and she knows it’s not just her. Once, a couple of months before the Basketball Incident, she’d been in the bathroom when she heard Amelia Martin burst through the doors and the telltale tapping of her fingernails across her phone.

 

“I swear, it’s like your pheromones have lined up or something, I don’t care if Derek’s a boy. Every month when you’re on your period, I’m suddenly dealing with two excessively growly teenagers.”

 

Paige frowned at Amelia, who paused her rant once she realized she wasn’t alone, brow furrowing slightly before turning away, “I don’t care, Laura. He’s your brother. Teach him some control and respect.”

 

\---

 

She gasped awake to an unbearable weight on her chest, only to hear a curse and the sounds of footsteps backing away. Paige sat up, her heart beating furiously the moment she realized someone was trying to _bury her in a ditch_.

 

The pain – the pain was gone. She turned, her fingers stained with dried blood, and lifted up her shirt only to realize that the bite mark was had disappeared as well.

 

Dirt fell from above her head and her eyes snapped up, looking up at Peter Hale standing above her, his smile a little too smug, “You’re alive, then.”

 

“You – ”

 

“Peter,” another voice sounds out and the man turns before lowering his head, bearing his neck. Paige sees an arm reach out and curl around his neck in a gesture that should have been soothing if not for the fact that claws had pierced his skin, forcing a whimper from his throat, “Leave.”

 

Talia reaches down into the ditch and wraps her hands around Paige’s arms to haul her out, her eyes flashing red for a moment under the moon’s light and Paige shrinks away.

 

Talia looks down at her, mouth a thin line, “I’m sorry you got caught up in this.”

 

“What happened? I thought. I thought I died.”

 

The older woman looks down at her, and for a moment Paige remembers moments when she met Talia Hale during one of the Hale celebrations, her eyes surprisingly warm and her embrace secure, and feels safe.

 

“You did. But something seems to have brought you back. But – perhaps it’s time you leave Beacon Hills.”

 

Paige’s eyes widen, “But – ”

 

Talia’s arm wraps around Paige’s shivering shoulders, providing reassuring warmth against the night, “I suspect there’ll be things happening around here soon, consequences, if you will.  Nature’s way of balancing itself out. I think it would be best if you weren’t here to witness it.”

 

_It’s my decision_ , she thinks, but the protest dies in her throat when she remembers Talia’s eyes, the steel in her voice as she told Peter to leave them. So she tries another route, “Derek. I have to see Derek.”

 

Talia’s arm remains across her shoulder the entire walk back to her house, her eyes warm but her tone hardens, “Derek will heal. Leave here, don’t come back.”

 

\---

 

The thing is, the Hales do try to be subtle, and it works most of the time because most people don’t look at a series of arbitrary instances and think: _there’s a pattern here_.

 

Paige notices these things though.

 

It’s not just what Amelia says that tipped her off, it was the way Laura brushes her hand across Derek’s neck at the end of the day when they meet in the hallway, the way Peter Hale arrives on their campus sometimes and looks like he _sniffs_ out his nephew with a slight tilt of his nose, the way there’s always a Hale party directly after a report of a strange animal attack gets printed.

 

Mostly though, Paige thinks it’s because Derek Hale is a smug asshole who wouldn’t recognize subtlety even if it slapped him in the face.

 

It’s the way the boy tilts his head slightly at the door and knows exactly when to stop harassing Greenberg before Finstock walks in, the way he always smirks at Laura before heading for basketball practice like they’re in on a joke and everyone else is the punchline, the way she’s convinced she heard him growl at Harris, once, even if it was so low that the only reason she heard it was because she sat in front of him.

 

\---

 

In retrospect, she thinks she should have said something.

 

After the initial shock wears off she tries hard not to be angry, to ignore the frustration when she opened the doors of her home, covered in dirt and blood and yet completely unscathed.

 

She bites down on her anger, doesn’t want it to go down as transference when her parents are looking at her with eyes wide and words frantic, so she just asks to leave and stops short of giving any explanation.

 

In retrospect, she thinks he should have asked her.

 

\---

 

She isn’t surprised that the Basketball Incident occurs, actually.

 

She is surprised, however, that she may have misjudged Derek’s character.

 

Around the seventh time he silently entered the music room during her cello practice only to pull out a book to read, feet tapping lightly to the rhythm of her metronome, and the eleventh and final time he called his friends out to apologize after they’d casually brushed her lunch off her bench, Paige finally responded to his nod at the end of her practice with a clenched, “Thanks.”

 

She watched, wary but a little amused with the jerk of his eyebrows as his eyes widened in surprise, before he smiled, ducking his head, “Anytime.”

 

\---

 

The dreams come slowly, trickling into her subconscious that she doesn’t recognize the pattern until they’ve become full-fledged visions. They vary, but it’s always the same tree that she sees, with a familiar symbol carved onto it. In some she’s standing in a cemetery and headstones surround her and the oak, in others she’s with her back to the tree and Talia Hale stares, eyes warm as she reaches out and apologizes and apologizes. 

 

She always wakes the moment she looks down at her hands, always covered in fresh blood, gasps for breath and feels a phantom warmth spread across her arms, heart pounding and a restless energy beating through her body.

 

\---

 

Derek had a habit of rubbing his hands over the pulse points on her neck. He had an extremely annoying ability of calling her out on her lies when no one else realized. He always seemed to know when her parents overwhelmed her a little, dragging her towards the music room to her cello even when she snapped at him. He always disappeared for a couple of days every month, around the same time that Amelia’s remarks towards anybody who catches her eye get extra hurtful because Laura supposedly has a monthly medical appointment in another town.

 

She doesn’t know what to think, so she researches. Then she goes with it.

 

\---

 

Her parents are always on edge after that night; so when they offer her therapy she shrugs, thinks about how to explain werewolves, and agrees.

 

Paige thought it ought to help her with her dreams, but her therapist simply tells her she’s holding on to old anger. That she needs to confront her past and let it go.

 

But the moments that she thinks of Derek aren’t that bitter anymore, she remembers more about how he’d sneak into her practices just to listen to her play, remembers how he nearly burnt down her kitchen the first time he tried to make grilled cheese for her, remembers his firm grip of her hand as he introduced her to his family, remembers his embrace and how safe she felt with him.

 

She tries telling her therapist that there isn’t much to let go off, but then she thinks of the oak trees in her dreams, the blood on her hands, the endless thrumming of _something_ just underneath her skin, Peter’s smug smile and Talia’s red eyes, “Leave Beacon Hills.”

 

\---

 

The dreams start occurring almost every night the closer she gets to California, the symbol carved onto the oak tree appearing more vividly, more like a memory rather than a vision.

 

She knows what she needs to do; research, after all, has always been easy for her.

 

When Jennifer Blake returns to Beacon Hills, the town is still overrun with supernatural beings, nothing much has changed.

 

She drives into town and takes a walk around; most people don’t take note of her, some extend their welcome, but an elderly man does a double take, says, “Pai –", before shaking his head and offering her a stilted smile.

 

It’s probably for the best that no one really recognizes her; she has a debt to pay. 

 

\---

 

A month after their first somewhat civil exchange in the music room that quickly led to both of them having actual conversations, and a week after she’d finished her research, she’d gone to the grocery only to have her suspicions confirmed by Talia.

 

Paige had been looking for some peanut butter when she heard a click of heels and a sharp intake of breath. She jumped, turning around to see Talia at the end of the aisle, nose flaring. She grimaced, her hand immediately flying up to her neck, where Derek’s hand had brushed against right before he left.

 

Talia’s eyes widened slightly, eyebrows drawing up slightly before the corners of her mouth lifted in a knowing smirk, “Aren’t you a keeper.”

 

\---

 

Jennifer knows a lot about the amnesia that comes from trauma – for the longest time she’d let her parents use that to explain the gap in her memory of that night, appreciated that they knew not to push too hard. So when Derek walks into the boiler room and offers his hand but doesn’t do anything further than that, she wonders how much of that night he remembers, tries to think if him recognizing her would foil her plans.

 

Except. Except she sees how tightly he’s holding himself, the grim set of his mouth even when he tries to offer her a reassuring smile, the exhaustion that seems to line his stance.

 

She finds herself wondering, for the first time, if Talia had overestimated his ability to heal.

 

\---

 

Once, when she had been waiting for Derek to finish his basketball practice, Peter Hale had approached her with a juice box.

 

She looked at his outstretched arm and quirked an eyebrow at him, “Really?”

 

Peter shrugged, “We haven’t really been introduced. Since we’re both free right now, I thought to myself: why waste such a good opportunity?”

 

There was something about his smile that made her stomach queasy, an edge that she wasn’t comfortable with, but she took the drink anyway.

 

He responded with a smile, slow and predatory, the moment she took a slip. “Such a pleasure meeting you.”

 

\---

 

The first time she grips the garotte, her hands are trembling and she pulls a little too tight, the energy underneath her skin rushing out like a dam breaking open. In that moment, she understands with a sickening moment of clarity that it wasn’t that Talia was protecting her when she asked Paige to leave; she was trying to protect her town.

 

_Nature’s way of balancing things out_.

 

She stands for what feels like hours in her shower, trying to scrub away her skin and the feel of fresh blood tricking down her arms – just like her dreams. She thinks of stopping, but when she closes her eyes she sees headstones, oak trees and she hears Talia's voice in her head, apologizing and apologizing. She feels the energy propel her forward.

 

The scent gets removed easily enough, but every time she looks down she sees blood again, over her fingers, running up her arms.

 

\---

 

There’s an age-old conflict going on in Beacon Hills – anyone with any sense of self-preservation, curiosity and common sense ought to know that.

 

Jennifer has no interest in getting caught up in it, but that hope died out the moment she walked into the café around the corner of her apartment and bumped into Ennis.

 

She freezes, heartbeat racing wildly against her chest, waiting, _waiting_ for the moment when he would recognize her as that terrified girl from too many moons ago, but the alpha merely grumbled out an apology before heading out the door.

 

Deucalion pays her a visit a couple of days later, cane in one hand, a deal in the other.

 

“I know why you’re here,” he says. “Perhaps we could help each other out.”

 

It’s not much of a hardship, she thinks, this is about balance.

 

She persuades Harris to put wolfsbane into Finstock’s whistle when he recognizes her, drowns out his pleas for mercy with the knowledge of one less death she needs to account for.

 

\---

 

The problem is, she never expected Derek to approach her and then proceed to almost bleed out next to her car, not after she’s poisoned his pack in a half hearted hope that that would be enough.

 

Virgins, warriors, healers. Those she could handle easily enough. Supernaturals require a little more stealth. She’s done her research, she’s calculated her odds; on a good day it’s still thirty percent strategic planning and seventy percent luck.

 

She looks at the claw marks deep in his chest and thinks about the night he gripped her bloodied hand a little too hard against his chest, the night he tried so hard to ease the pain out from her that he’d exhausted himself. She sees the fight go out of him a little and doesn’t open her mouth to ask about Talia, about Laura, reminds herself that he might be better off not knowing.

 

“I’ve been hurt before,” she tries.

 

“Not like this.”

 

_Yes_ , she thinks, _exactly like this_. It’s the way he looks at her then that has her moving in, his face open and vulnerable, and in that instant she sees the boy she loved clutching her close and asking, “You still liked me?”

 

When he kisses her back, soft and trembling, something inside her chest loosens a little, and she desperately wants to know what happened in the spaces that she’d left, wants to sink her hands into his skin and hold him close.

 

_You were wrong, Talia_ , she thinks. _He hasn’t healed_.

 

\---

 

“Why are you doing this?”

 

Jennifer pauses and slowly turns around. It’s been a long time since she’s had people moving too silently around her.

 

Derek’s hands are clenching and unclenching as he stands in the middle of her apartment, eyes a familiar shade of red.

 

“Doing what?” She tries, reaching for him, but he growls and takes a step back.

 

“Paige.”

 

She stills, “How long?”

 

“Since that night in the loft. You. Your kiss,” he stops, eyes returning to their usual hazel hue, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

She shrugs, ignores his flinch when she says, “We were so young, Derek. We made mistakes. I had to leave.”

 

Derek breathes heavily, looking down at his hands, “I’m so sorry. About that night. I should’ve told you everything. I shouldn’t have let – I should have asked you.”

 

She slips her hands into his, surprised to find them trembling, “Derek, I haven’t blamed you for a long, long time.”

 

“Then why are you doing this? Why are you going after my pack?”

 

“This isn’t about you – Derek. Not really. I have a debt to pay. Consequence, if you will. Re-balancing something knocked off center the night I was brought back.”

 

He shuts his eyes tightly, voice small, “Boyd. Kali didn’t have to – Was that you?”

 

She nods when he looks at her again, before looking down at their joined hands, feeling for a moment, the warm rush of blood against her fingers like the remnants of a dream, the Celtic symbol fresh in her mind, “I’m almost done, Derek. The girl was supposed to be the last.”

 

“I can’t let you kill Lydia.”

 

Jennifer smiles slightly, “I might not need to.”

 

\---

 

Jennifer walks into her bedroom and stops before Peter Hale, hanging from the ceiling with wolfsbane infused ropes, surrounded by mountain ash.

 

“Wasn’t that sweet?” Peter spits out, eyes flashing bright blue when the ropes dig at his wrists.

 

“I always knew it was you who told Derek to bring me to that tree.”

 

Peter coughs out a pained laugh, “It really wasn’t that hard to figure out, was it?”

 

She pulls on a lever, watches the rope tighten around his forearms and ignores the smell of burnt flesh and Peter’s pained cry.

 

“Derek would have never thought turning me, even if he did he wouldn’t have gone to Ennis without consulting Talia first. Why go through with it at all?”

 

“I had to know. I had to know if I could do it. Think of it,” he paused, teeth biting down on his lips hard enough to draw blood, and Jennifer watched as black lines slowly crawled up his arm. “Think of it as an _experiment_.”

 

“It was so easy, you know. “Trust your Uncle Peter, Derek,” I told him. “Let me take care of it so that she’ll accept your wolf.” It was _too easy_. All I did afterwards was draft that pathetic letter to you and pull Ennis in. And trust me, the alpha didn’t need any persuading at all. Thank you, really, you taught me everything I needed.”

 

Her eyes narrow, “Have the dreams started? The oak tree. The cemeteries. The blood.”

 

Peter smiles, slow, and the blood on his teeth make him look manic enough that makes her glad for the mountain ash, for her hand on the lever. “Paige,” he starts, and it sends a chill down her spine, makes her remember a day long ago with a bench, a juice box and a twisting unease in her gut, “Those are the only dreams I remember having.”

 

Her hands clench down on the lever but she doesn’t move it, and he takes it as invitation to carry on, “Do you really think you can kill me? Derek will find me, and he may let me be tortured for a little while longer, but I’m the boy’s _family_. I’m what’s _left_ of his family. He won’t let me die.”

 

The satisfaction in his voice, the smug narcissism, makes her snap. She walks right up to the edge of the line, thinks back to the night when Ennis attacked her and how even in the haze that followed she thought she’d heard a sharp breath of panic and the squeak of a second pair of sneakers.

 

“Derek knows you’re here, Peter.”

 

His smile freezes, just a second, and her eyes drop to watch the wolfsbane creep closer to his heart.

 

“You’re lying,” he snarls, body already shaking.

 

“Maybe,” Jennifer says, turning her back towards him for the last time and leaving the apartment.

 

\---

 

The dreams stop, the restless energy resides, but her hands always feel heavy.  

 

This time, as she leaves Beacon Hills, Derek noses over her pulse point in a move that feels more like gratitude than goodbye, holds her hand in a grip that’s too familiar; the strength of it pulls a little on her heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Buddy Wakefield's Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars.


End file.
